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See an R&D preview of V-Ray RT for MotionBuilder

The teaser for Construct, Blur Studio VFX supervisor Kevin Margo‘s new CG short, is pretty amazing in its own right. You can see it at the top of this story. But what really caught our eye was the making-of.

In the description for the video, posted on Chaos Group’s YouTube channel, the developer describes it as “the first R&D demonstration of V-Ray RT for MotionBuilder”.

The video was posted on 1 April, but if it is an April Fool, it’s a very elaborate one: the footage shows what Margo describes as real-time path tracing in the MotionBuilder viewport, fed out to an OptiTrack Insight VCS camera.

“That’s some amazing-looking previz,” says Margo. “I don’t know if you could even call it previz any more.”

According to Margo, the short is also being rendered using V-Ray RT GPU: this time the 3ds Max version, running on a 3DBOXX 4920 workstation with Nvidia K6000 and K40 GPUs.

Both of those are $5,000-plus cards, so that’s some pretty serious hardware, but the render times are still impressive: typically 5-10 minutes, according to Margo, including depth of field and motion blur.